Nvidia Shines at CES 2018

Subscribe for Updates

Join the Transportation Tech mailing list today and get a free copy of our white paper submitted to ITS World Congress!

2018’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas showcased dozens of futuristic, cool and drool-inducing products ranging from rollable TVs to robotic pets (drool not included). But none were more exciting, perhaps, than tech giant Nvidia’s debut of its next-generation autonomous driving stack, which the company says is poised to power tomorrow’s Level 5, fully-autonomous vehicles that’ll be jam-packed with artificial intelligence.

For starters, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang introduced the world to Xavier—which it hails as the world’s most powerful system on a chip. Xavier will be tasked with performing the essential operations underlying Level 5 autonomy—like processing the situational data collected from vehicle sensors, Lidar, radar and cameras. To accomplish this task, Nvidia loaded Xavier with more than 9 billion transistors, which it says can perform 30 trillion operations per second using only 30 watts of power. The processor is equipped with a custom 8-core CPU, a 512-core Volta GPU, an 8K HDR video processor, a deep-learning accelerator and new computer-vision accelerators.

Xavier will serve as the foundation for Nvidia’s freshly-announced Drive IX and Drive AR software platforms, which will power AI-infused vehicle applications like facial and voice recognition, gaze monitoring, infotainment and augmented reality. Imagine a car that can recognize your face as you leave the grocery store and pop the trunk for you, or take cues from your eye movements that you’re too drowsy to drive (source: ZDNet).

The whole package shebang is part of Nvidia’s Pegasus AI computing platform, which the company touts as the world’s first AI car supercomputer. Pegasus consists of two Xavier units and Nvidia GPUs, and can deliver 320 trillion operations per second with a form-factor the size of a license plate.

At CES, Huang revealed that over 300 customers are currently developing around Nvidia Drive technology. Volkswagen CEO Herbert Deiss joined Huang on stage to announce the former’s plans to build its next-generation intelligent vehicles around Nvidia’s Drive IX platform. Meanwhile, Uber has also announced a partnership with Nvidia to bring AI computing to the mobility giant’s fleet of self-driving cars.